Katherine Addison's Blog, page 54

February 22, 2014

UBC: Halttunen

Halttunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.


My initial reservations about this book have been vindicated. Halttunen is an unnuanced reader, with the difficulty common to both historians and literary critics of confusing fiction and nonfiction primary sources. (The fact that some of Halttunen's primary sources are heavily-fictionalized accounts of nominally nonfictional events merely underlines in red the need for a nuanced and careful discussion of the nature of fiction here.) She persists throughout in praising the Puritan view of murderers as a compassionate one, as opposed to the Gothic view that alienated them from "normal" human beings. (And she missed a great opportunity to use Kristeva's idea of abjection.) Now, I'm not arguing that the Gothic/Enlightenment formulation of human nature didn't alienate murderers and other criminals from the rest of humanity or that it is not a formulation that desperately needs to be deconstructed, questioned, and debunked. But I still feel that there's something fundamentally flawed about her argument:
To be sure, defense attorneys routinely appealed to jurors' compassion for their mentally afflicted defendants: Daniel Corey, argued his attorney, "is much more entitled to compassion and protection, than to severity." But such compassion was dramatically different from the early American sympathy invoked for the "Poor Man" Jeremiah Meacham. Whereas the compassion for Meacham was grounded in empathy, a genuine identification of all people with the universal fallen state they shared with the condemned criminal, the compassion invoked for the nineteenth-century mad person was grafted onto radical difference.
(236)

I don't think that what she's describing is empathy, and I don't think that the simplistic unquestioning view of human nature as fallen, sinful, and inherently evil is better than the struggle over the past two centuries to question that doctrine, even though she points out, as if it somehow invalidated the process of asking, that we don't have answers to the questions of how and why people commit evil. (She seems to feel that the failure to find satisfactory answers is what feeds our insatiable hunger for true crime. Presumably also for mystery fiction? Since she doesn't distinguish clearly between fiction and nonfiction, I suppose it must be.) Her epilogue, in which she discusses Dead Man Walking and Seven, praises Morgan Freeman's character in the latter and Sister Prejean in the former, aligning both explicitly with the Puritan execution sermons, because "they will not label murderers as moral aberrations, subhuman monsters. They murderer, they agree, is not the devil; he's just a man, subject to sin as they themselves are subject to sin. . . . Significantly, neither Detective Somerset nor Sister Prejean is particularly engaged with the challenge of satisfactorily explaining human evil. It is enough simply to acknowledge its universality" (250). This book suggests that a liberal, secular worldview is a bad thing to have, and I don't agree with that at all

(Also, she's still wrong about the origins of horror as a genre.)

Halttunen also has the slumming problem; she spends the whole book holding her subject matter at arm's length (and she would much rather discuss theories about murderers and victims and narratives than the narratives themselves). Now, I will be the first to admit that true crime, as a genre, is morally and ethically problematic, but I don't agree with Halttunen that that means we get to congratulate ourselves on being above all that . . . as we read a book about true crime. I think that any book about true crime (which is what her book is about) needs to grapple with the fact that human beings do read about murder, and needs to work out a theory of why that can provide something more like an answer than Sam the Eagle's "You are all weirdos."
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Published on February 22, 2014 18:39

February 21, 2014

I number things. It lets me pretend that order can triumph over chaos.

1. Yesterday I posed with a giant inflatable colon to promote colorectal cancer awareness. Most surreal Thursday morning ever.

Yes, a colonoscopy is not the most fun you will ever have, but speaking as a friend of the awesome Jay Lake and as someone who has had a polyp removed from her colon and will be going back for another screening in a couple years, colon cancer needs to be beaten to death with a stick.

2. Liz Bourke has reviewed The Goblin Emperor for Tor.com. As an author, positive reviews are great, but what you really want are good reviews, reviews that understand the book you tried to write and convey it well. This is that kind of review.

3. I am currently undergoing all kinds of adjustments to my . . . I don't even know what to call it. The victory conditions for sleep? They're shipping me a different mask to try with the little Cthulhu machine. It will still look like a disastrous attempt at an elephant costume, but hopefully it will (a) be more comfortable and (b) seal to my face better. Yes, I have seen Aliens. Please don't remind me.

But ALSO, my sleep doctor and I are trying to rejigger my RLS medications, because I'd gotten to the point where it was requiring way too much narcotics to club the damn thing into unconsciousness. The new medication is definitely working, so that's a plus, and I am re-weaning myself off the narcotics. Yes, there has been just a tiny bit of withdrawal. I haven't gone off them entirely yet, but I am working on it because I hate the damn drugs. I am hoping that when I can finally stop taking them, I will be less tired and also that my creativity will come back again.

It did come back in December and January before drying up again in February, and the creepy thing is that I can actually articulate the difference. When everything is working correctly (i.e., what I thought of as "normal" until the clusterfuck began in 2010), there are words in my head. Well, there are always words in my head. I am like Hector Puncheon, who "usually thought articulately, and often, indeed, conversed quite sensibly aloud with his own soul." So maybe it's more accurate to say that the staus quo ante, to which I desire ardently to return, is that there are stories forming, word by word. Because there are words, separate from my internal narration/dialogue. They form themselves into sentences, and the sentences form narratives. When it was working right, I would frequently "get" sentences from Booth out of nowhere.

Now, I can force prose. There are always days when you have to. But it's not the same, at least from my side of the proscenium, and I really didn't realize what I'd lost until I had it back. I didn't realize that there was a wellspring, that I wasn't imagining that writing used to involve joy instead of just grim desperation.

I had it back, and then the RLS went bad, and it was gone again. I knew that bad RLS nights correlated with low or nonexistent creativity, and now I know what it's attacking. I know that there's a thing that should be there that isn't. And I can only hope that it can grow back. Again.
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Published on February 21, 2014 11:43

February 18, 2014

Join John and Mary's Insect Army! and other better uses of your time

So there has recently been some (more) ugliness in the online science fiction community with some (more) spouting of bigoted claptrap. I don't particularly want either to link to it or to talk about it, but I do want to link to three responses:
N. K. Jemisin's explanation of the misappropration of the First Amendment in the Truesdale petition
John Scalzi's exhortation to Join the Insect Army!
Juliet E. McKenna on Why the SFWA Shoutback Matters

Ms. McKenna's post includes some comments on the invisibility of female writers of epic fantasy (which comments I can testify to the truthfulness of from personal experience), and in fist-shaking defiance of that invisibility I shall tell you that matociquala 's The Steles of the Sky got a starred review from Kirkus Reviews : "Considering the trilogy as a whole, the overused term masterpiece justifiably applies."

And since Mary Robinette Kowal was the person with the bullseye painted on her in this go-round, I also wish to commend her to you as a writer, a puppeteer, a fearless (former) SFWA officer, and an excellent human being.

Also, this seems like a good moment to remind you that the Con or Bust auction is still ongoing (through February 23), and the plethora of awesome items is downright bedazzling. Should you be interested in my particular items, he bidding for Unnatural Creatures stands at $80 and the bidding for The Goblin Emperor stands at $200.
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Published on February 18, 2014 11:28

February 17, 2014

Starred review! Dust jacket! Also kitty!

ETA: Kirkus gives The Goblin Emperor a starred review. Please add exclamation points to taste.

My splendid editor, casacorona , has an equally splendid assistant, who today sent me the dust jacket for The Goblin Emperor.

Fig. 1: My lovely assistant Catzilla* will show it to you:

catzilla1

Fig. 2: What do you mean, that isn't what you wanted?

catzilla3

Fig. 3: For somebody we only keep around for your thumbs, you're AWFULLY picky.

catzilla4

Fig. 4: Is THIS better?

catzilla2

Perfect, Catzilla. Thank you.

---
*No, Catzilla isn't his real name. It's his internet handle.
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Published on February 17, 2014 11:07

February 16, 2014

not yet a book review: Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination

I am not giving up on Karen Halttunen's Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Harvard UP: 1998) because I have hopes that it's going to improve, but I have to note my dissatisfactions with the first couple of chapters while I can still remember how to articulate them:

1. Halttunen is portraying secular horror as the invention of the late eighteenth century Gothic movement, which it isn't. This is the result of two problems with her argument: (a) she can't quite seem to decide if she's writing about America only or if she wants to include British and European examples and (b) tunnel vision, which ignores pagan ideas of horror (granted, a millennium or two before the texts she wants to talk about) and secular horror before and contemporaneous with the Puritan American execution sermons that are where she starts her argument (see, for example, my icon, and the entire genre of revenge tragedy).

2. She is a very unnuanced reader, so that she is portraying Puritan execution sermons as if they represent, unproblematically, the reaction of Puritan society to murder. The fallacy in this argument is perfectly present in her commentary, which notes that these same sermons tend to bewail the falling away of Puritan people from godly Puritan ideals, and also notes that they are ritual and therefore a stereotypic series of literary gestures. Both of these characteristics suggest that these sermons may, in fact, have very little to do with how the members of Puritan societies reacted to murders and murderers in their midst.

3. I have been left with the impression that she finds the reaction to murder in the Puritan execution sermons more morally commendable than the Gothic reaction, because the Puritan reaction is more compassionate toward the murderer and more inclusive, portraying him or her as a fallen sinner like other human beings, instead of a horrifying monster completely alienated from the moral norm. My problems here are four:

(a) I fully admit to being a left-wing bleeding heart liberal, and I do believe that the practice of compassion is one of the most crucial and literally vital in the human species' capability, but I am made very uneasy when compassion for the murderer seems to eclipse any kind of judgment of their crime. I have not read any Puritan execution sermons and I frankly don't feel that I will be any time soon, so I don't know if the impression I have received from Halttunen's discussion of them is correct, but when compassion for a mother who murders her newborn is offered not on the basis of the terrible circumstances that forced her to it, but on the basis of "we're all depraved sinners whose sin is inherent and inescapable" I'm actually reluctant to call it "compassion" at all.

(b) I disagree with her implied contempt/distaste for the Gothic (because, duh, horror writer), so I feel that I am also being judged and found wanting (or "ungodly," to use a particularly Puritan piece of terminology). Any reader of genre fiction will be familiar with this feeling and will know why I am not happy about it.

(c) I don't particularly like moral judgments in my social/literary history ANYWAY, and if the author has to make them--and I fully grant that sometimes an author does--I want them to be EXPLICIT and honestly owned up to. (Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors is the best example I know.)

(d) Puritanism, as a socioreligious movement, is all about intolerance and exclusion AS VIRTUES: the whole idea of the "godly community" is that you shut out everybody who isn't exactly what you want them to be. (Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, that is the reason the Puritans hired the Mayflower and sailed to America: religious "freedom" by way of eliminating everyone who disagrees with you; see also, gestures being made by certain people today.) So if we're going to argue for compassionate inclusion on the part of Puritan divines, I really need to see a lot more digging around in the contradictions invovled.

Now, I understand that the Puritans are not the point of Halttunen's book--which is why I have hopes for improvement--but I'm not best pleased with her handling of the material.

We shall see.
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Published on February 16, 2014 15:19

February 11, 2014

5 things (at least my disorganization is better contained)

1. I swear to god I was going to stop, but then I looked at the window this morning.

1392127579957

1392127592575

1392127609373

2. The bidding for Unnatural Creatures has reached $75, and the bidding for The Goblin Emperor has reached $100 (!). Y'all are awesome.

3. Apparently, I will be at C2E2 this April.(I say "apparently" because I can't quite believe I agreed to anything that terrifies me as much as a convention with 50,000 (FIFTY THOUSAND) attendees.) I will provide more details as I am able.

4. In case you missed it yesterday, the first two chapters of The Goblin Emperor are available for free download at katherineaddison.com. And, no, I am unlikely to put up more. That's why they call it a teaser.

5. This really is the best picture of a wildlife photographer ever taken. EVER.
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Published on February 11, 2014 10:45

February 10, 2014

sample chapters, The Goblin Emperor

The first two chapters of The Goblin Emperor are available for free download at katherineaddison.com. Spread the word!
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Published on February 10, 2014 14:02